I think you've made a really good point there about front paging nodes and nodes that may be edited at the same concurrent time. Possibly an answer to that would be to allow the submitter to edit the node until they are sure that they no longer wish to edit it...and check it off that it's okay to be front paged. If a node is never checked off, it'll never be on the front page. Just a suggestion - may not be a good one. :)